Lane Smallwood

Lane Smallwood was born to the same family as Iain Underholm Smallwood, a younger sister to him by two years, in -73 EC. The exact date of her birth was lost due to a clerical error in the Office of Knowledge About Things. It seems that the Office regularly removed all information about persons 20 days after their death to prevent others from looking through their lives for sordid details. However, a calculation error in a Geolan Calculating Machine led to the removal of the records 20 days after her birth. The error was not discovered for many years, long after the time when accurate records could be re-created.

She studied under her parents, Roger and Alice Bob, hoping to follow in their footsteps as an active member of the Endlessly Rising Staircase Movement. However, upon her mother's death, she retreated from the world to a place she now refers to only as Gyll Hill for a period of six years. Estranged from her brother, then Baron Smallwood, and her friends by her long time in hiding, she came back to the world with a new goal in mind: to destroy the Endlessly Rising Staircase Movement. She fought, rather successfully, against her parent's preferred crusade for many years, using guerrilla techniques to encourage a reduction in membership by any means possible.

However, Lane's woes did not end with the loss of her mother and father (to death and reclusiveness, respectively). When her older brother and childhood mentor was killed in -7 EC, she entered a period of mourning where she would speak to no one. Thus far, she has maintained that silence, and lives in solitude at a guest house behind Chez Smallwood, seldom seen and never heard. It seems she will never come out of this grieving, or perhaps only if the killer of her brother is found. In any case, the line of Smallwoods from Roger and Alice Bob will most likely never be continued.